Well, today was the big day -- get the tattoos fixed, after years and years of procrastination.

Unfortunately, things didn't exactly go as planned.

For starters, I didn't remember to bring the original designs with me, so Mike -- the artist -- was forced to simply eyeball it. Secondly ... well, the kitty cats *might* not be fixable. The long story short is that it sounds like Dave didn't really leave enough negative space for the detail elements, and/or he may have used too big of a needle and/or gone too deep (all of this is possible; when I got Zaphod -- my arm kitties -- done, Dave was just starting out with his own tattoo shop and was likely hella inexperienced).

Long story short: Mike punched up the eyeballs and teeth with white, and we're giving it two weeks to heal and then I'm going back. When I go back I *will* have the originals with me (well, hopefully -- the original Zaphod is a picture frame, so I know exactly where that is, but the original shoulderblade kitty was from a little drawing in a magazine. I found a photocopy in an old journal, but the xerox has faded and chipped. I'll keep looking, tho), and then the plan is to redo the black, and then redo the white *again* and hope that that at least gives the details a *chance* of popping.

I need to do a massive photo dump (hopefully later tonight) since I've uploaded a grand total of one picture this month, but I wanted to share the pictures from today (mostly compliments of furious_mold):

Before

Detail. To give you an idea of what was missing, this is a Peruvian tunic with a very similar design (mine weren't exactly like this, but close).

Shoulderblade, before. She still looks exactly the same, BTW.

After. The whites won't stay nearly this white (I feel like they've already faded considerably) and may not even take at all. I'm crossing my fingers for merely *some* improvement over the "before" pictures.